After the Avalanche: Life as an Adventure Photographer With PTSD (Part 2)

After surviving an avalanche in 2011, photographer Cory Richard's world began to fall apart. Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, he found that the only escape from the struggles of daily life was the adrenaline rush of a good adventure.

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C.

In the field, I feel so connected to everything, but then I come home and I would feel so disconnected and I started to hate coming home because I wasn't stimulated. I'd have to sit in this quietness and feel this pain and I didn't know where it was coming from and I felt myself withdrawing further, and I had a beautiful wife who genuinely loved me, but you know, in the field, I felt like I was in a tribe. I felt like I was together. It was egalitarian, we cared for each other, there was responsibility, we took care of one another, and then I'd come home and I'd feel completely alone, and I'd feel a nothingness, and I think those elements of tribalism are really important in our lives. We are better when we are with people who hold us accountable. We are better together. Not just with one person. As a group, we are better together. And I literally couldn't reconcile the noise of this urban life that I'd come back to, going to Whole Foods and have literal... I can have anything I want. What kind of chocolate? What kind of organic whatever do you want? And having just come home from a place where people are out farming every day. I couldn't get over the noise that I was hearing. It was a very distracting hum and I'd think, I'd get up in the morning and I'd go, I can get through the day today, I got this. I don't have to drink tonight, I can just... And by noon, it was so much that that's when I would, you know, have my first drink, and I never drank to get drunk. I just drank to calm it down because I was screaming inside and I didn't know how to stop it, because the only places that helped me were the places where I was distracted, I was in the field, and I was part of a tribe, and I couldn't be disassociated out there. I had a singular focus, and I think it was more to the point that I felt cared for. I'd come home and we'd gloss over everything and there's this event, this avalanche, going back to it started to appear as the event that sparked this great divide in my life, because it had shot me in one direction upwards. My career had taken off, and yet inside, I was completely nosediving towards some sort of vacuous rock bottom that I couldn't define. The reason I put this up here is because my wife and I were not communicating about it. We weren't talking about it. There was such a space between us, and I love this shot because it's so typical of us. It's trying to get the camera above all the (bleep), just to get the pretty stuff, and that's not what human relationships are. That's not what life is; life is the (bleep). It's not just the skyline, and there was too much distance between us to sustain, and I found myself completely alone. Oftentimes surrounded by people, but completely alone. But the best part is, in my job, there's always a way to go distract yourself, so the next assignment came. It was to northern Burma or Myanmar. It's changing at a very rapid pace. My life was changing at a rapid pace and I felt like this was a perfect way to reconcile all those differences. I was gonna solve all the problems. This country is steeped in mystery and antiquity. It's one of the most beautiful landscapes I'd ever seen, but the northern regions, specifically, are... They've just emerged from decades of bloody civil war. It's a very impoverished nation. The northern reaches have been, the Kachin State has been off limits to outsiders for decades, so our access was incredible, and that's actually something we do very well here, is we get access, and that is a very huge privilege. It makes the stories richer. It gets us into places that we would not otherwise be able to go. But it's interesting too, when I look at my photography on this trip, specifically in urban environments, it was changing as well. I was running so hard from everything that was happening in my life, it was pushing me outward with my photography, and I was trying to get closer and I was trying to be more bold and I was getting more and more in people's face, and I thought it was because I was able to get away from all that pain, and in fact, I think it was because I was carrying it with me and they recognized, I think, when we bring our baggage with us, people recognize that. It's a non-verbal thing, but people say, okay, this person's human and they let you into your space in a much more profound way. When you are equal, when you are not a different guy, you know, you're not the white dude with the big camera, you're the broken guy who hurts all day, they're like, oh, give him a shot. We'll let him go there. The point of the trip was to go overland for 60 days through the jungle to measure the highest point in southeast Asia. We were trying to solve this big geographical mystery that had been created by the war. The war creates holes in the map. If you can't go there and modern science hasn't gone there for decades, how are we gonna know what exists there? So we were actually mapping and trying to measure the highest point in southeast Asia. Like I said, it was an overland journey and we were going first by overnight buses. It was great, like it was amazing. First, the bus barely starts, then all the seats are full, and then you're like, oh, that's pretty packed. Like, three people to two seats, and then they start bringing in the little chairs that you put your kids in at the kids' table and they just put 'em down the aisle, right in the middle, and they get full grown men to sit down in those. It's a really great scene. Don't try to go to the bathroom; it doesn't work. Then we took a 24 hour boat up the Irrawaddy River We took what's called the death train. You guys should YouTube it. It's a train that hasn't been cared for since the British left, so you're literally, you're just waiting to derail. It's like 24 hours of waiting for death, so if the avalanche didn't traumatize me, I'm sure that did. At least my back was almost broken. I had about 50 spider bites on my leg when I got off the train somehow, and finally, planes, and then the last form of movement that we were taking were motorbikes, and we were gonna take motorbikes 80 miles into the jungle before we started our walk, and these guys were awesome. As the writer called them, the Baby's Hell's Angels, logically, because their bikes are tiny but they were pretty awesome, they were legit. One morning, I remember waking up and the bikes are loaded, overloaded, really, and this one guy grabs a beer. It's like seven; it's fine, no judgment. I've done it, you know, we're talking about this. Let's be honest, and cracks his beer and then he pours some out. I'm like, that's cool, some for the homies, good. No, then he takes a little bottle of whiskey and just fills it back up. I'm like, I'm riding with that dude 'cause that's gonna be fun. Anyway, I did ride with that dude that day and as soon as his bike fell over with me on it, I was trying to take pictures falling off the side, but then we decided, well, now that we're done with this, let's walk into the jungle for 150 miles. For those of you who haven't walked through a jungle, you don't need to, it's fine. Stay home, don't do it, it's awful. It's like walking inside a green ping pong ball, which is cool, you can get some neat images, kind of, but it's very monotonous and it provides you with a lot of time to think, and what do I do when I think? I get super uncomfortable because I have to focus on what's happening in my life. It was a long, long walk, and I started to think about some real serious things. But sometimes I could get distracted by crossing bamboo bridges that have zero metal on them. That's just all lashed together. Three people could cross at a time over these incredibly beautiful rivers. We couldn't see anything. We couldn't see the mountains at all. It was one of the craziest walks I've ever done 'cause you'd come into these washes and literally, if you fall here, you're just gonna die. It's like the most dangerous walking you've ever done, which feels so silly, but there's still no mountains. We can't see anything. We'd get to these villages and I was so amazed. I was taken back to one of the very first photos I showed, of the woman sleeping on the bench. We think of that life as so wrong, and yet these people, that is their life, every day, and yet they've managed to deal with it in a much different way. This place is untouched, except by war. It's completely subsistence living. There's no roads here, there's no helicopters. There's no medical, no dentist, no store. You need food? You kill it or you harvest it. You need medical? You pray or you figure it out or you get sick or you die. I mean, there is no help, and I was taken by that. The self reliance is something we've lost. And then after 30 days of walking, 150 miles of walking, this mountain sort of erupts. We've walked through the thick, dense rainforest and then we got to the deciduous trees and then the pines and then all of a sudden, we're into the rhododendrons and we can't see anything, and then all of a sudden, the day before the mountain, it just pops up, and it's right on the edge of the Tibetan plateau. It sort of rose out of mystery. We were kinda like, is there really a mountain here? Climbing a mountain by a new route is interesting because there is no path. People are like, well, you just go to the top, but it's actually very technical. Getting to the top is not a clear thing and I love that because that is just like life. I talked about that as I started. There is no path. We think of things as very linear, but things aren't linear, and when we put ourselves in that linear box, we tend to lose focus. We made all sorts of wrong turns. We'd climb up, we'd realize we were cliffed out. We'd have to go down. We blew hours trying to figure things out, and you know, it's those ups and downs that actually makes the climbing somewhat worth it, because you're learning as you go. Every time you make a mistake, hopefully, as in life, you learn from it. Finally, we got to our high point where we had to decide who was gonna go for the summit because we were a team of five and only three could really climb above this, and we made the decision and it splintered our team. It was very, very emotional. It was very high stakes at this point, but we had to make a decision of the most suited climbers to go, because the climbing above is like this, and that's actually pretty mellow compared to some of the other stuff that we were doing, which is interesting because you see the rope there. That just makes sure you don't die alone, so let that sit in for a second. Took a minute, right? That's just there to kill everybody because if you fall, nothing's gonna... We were worried about frostbite. We were on the north side. Renan was losing feeling in his toes. Finally, after 40 days of climbing, we popped over into the sun and we saw the summit for the first time. 40 days, Renan is that tired. He's not just chilling in the sun; he's that tired, and I was elated to see that ridge ahead of us, until I realized there was no way that we were gonna climb that. We kept going, 'cause you have to try, you have to try, but in my brain, it was so convoluted. It was so confusing, and I just didn't think we had the power to make it, and sure enough, we turned around. We turned around at that point of snow just behind Renan's left shoulder, so we were very close to the top, but the idea was, well, is this worth it? Because if we keep going, we're likely gonna die, and if we die, that's not gonna make anybody back home very happy. We were too depleted. We were too tired, and we failed. This is us returning to high camp, letting it sink in that we had just failed on this huge expedition for National Geographic and trying to evaluate, is there actual value in this failure? I think there is; I think there's value in all failure. Only when you surrender to it can you learn from it. Only when you give yourself over to it can you learn for the next time. We failed to bring enough rolling papers for the tobacco, so we started rolling cigarettes out of a book called Finding George Orwell in Burma, and that's what Renan is smoking there. That's actually a map of the exact region we were in, which is great. We're just like, we're done with this, burn it down. But I also knew that coming out, this was the trip where I realized, with all that time to think, that there were a lot more failures ahead of me. I was just beginning that, and it was the trip where I knew that, you know, my marriage was over. There was no way to reconcile what had happened. My despondence had pulled us apart. My confusion, my aloneness, my unwillingness to engage, my inability to engage had pulled us apart. I was so disconnected, and that disconnectedness had created a void, and a void that I had filled with anything I could, whether on assignment or at home, whether it was alcohol or women. I'm just gonna be honest with you guys. I cheated and I lied and I was a bad husband. I was a terrible person, and I was trying so hard to figure out, how could I be a good person and a bad person at the same time and I was ripped apart and I did all the things wrong, and those actions, they have consequences, and those consequences can hurt, and it really, really hurt because I destroyed something beautiful, and that put me in a very strange place. That's a pretty strange place. But I also started seeing differently with my photography. I was looking for different things, because I wanted to find a way out of what I was feeling, and yet I felt like I was getting further and further sucked in because this was how I left the house the last time, and that's a really, really hard image to look at. It's not something I like to remember, but it's something that's important to talk about.

After the Avalanche: Life as an Adventure Photographer With PTSD (Part 2)

After surviving an avalanche in 2011, photographer Cory Richard's world began to fall apart. Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, he found that the only escape from the struggles of daily life was the adrenaline rush of a good adventure.

The National Geographic Live series brings thought-provoking presentations by today’s leading explorers, scientists, photographers, and performing artists right to you. Each presentation is filmed in front of a live audience at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C.